July 25 (Bloomberg) -- Three fatal airline crashes in a
week mean 2014 is shaping up to become the worst year in almost
a decade for passenger fatalities.

The crash of a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircraft on the
fringes of the Sahara desert yesterday follows the loss of an
ATR-72 turboprop in storms in Taiwan on July 23 and the downing
of Malaysian Air Flight MH17 over Ukraine last week.

The African incident involving a plane operating for Air
Algerie takes the 2014 toll to 680 travelers, assuming those on
the jet died, higher than 12-month totals for the past three
years, according to air-safety consultants at Ascend Worldwide.
With five months remaining, a further 111 deaths would make this
the most lethal year since 2005, when 916 lives were lost,
though Ascend’s head of safety Paul Hayes said the direction in
accident-related fatalities is still down.

“It’s important to look at the long-term trends,” Hayes
said in an interview. “What looks likes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ year
-- let alone just seven months -- by itself means nothing. Fatal
accidents are now so rare that one or two more can completely
change the numbers.”

Fatalities in 2014 involving aircraft seating more than 14
people have come in six incidents, compared with 162 deaths in
10 incidents in 2013, he said. Only three of this year’s events
appear to be accidents of the kind that would ordinarily be
included in Ascend’s safety analysis, which excludes war and
terror-related losses beyond airlines’ control, Hayes said.

Safety Numbers

About 100,000 flights a day land without incident
worldwide, the International Air Transport Association said in a
statement. In 2013, passenger trips on airlines exceeded 3
billion, according to IATA.

“It’s a black week for air transport,” Air France-KLM
Group Chief Executive Officer Alexandre de Juniac said today in
an interview in Paris. “I can understand that passengers can be
worried, but I have to tell them that air transport is very
safe, probably the safest” means of travel.

The disappearance of Malaysian Airline System Bhd. Flight
MH370, in which a Boeing Co. 777 doubled back on its route from
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and vanished over the Indian Ocean, may
have involved pilot malpractice, experts have said. Some 227
passengers were traveling on the March 8 flight.

Black Boxes

Malaysian Air Flight MH17, which crashed a week ago
yesterday, killing all 283 passengers, was probably downed by a
ground-to-air missile strike in eastern Ukraine, U.S.
authorities have said. Black-box flight recorders from the
plane, also a 777, are undergoing analysis in the U.K., with the
examination of bodies also under way as experts seek evidence of
the rocket attack.

Another incident classified as non-accidental saw a woman
killed on a Pakistan International Airlines flight after the
Airbus Group NV A310 jet with 196 passengers aboard came under
fire, possibly from AK-47 assault rifles, while landing in the
northwestern city of Peshawar. The incident came two weeks after
a Taliban attack on Pakistan’s biggest airport in Karachi killed
36 people, none on aircraft.

The three other fatal events involved crashes more typical
of airline accidents over the decades, with 44 passengers killed
this week when a TransAsia Airways Corp. ATR-72 came down as it
prepared to land on Taiwan’s outlying Penghu Islands.

The turboprop was on a second approach to Magong Airport
when it went down amid heavy rains from tropical storm Matmo.

Some 15 travelers died when a Nepal Airlines de Havilland
Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter turboprop plane crashed into jungle on a
7,000-foot hillside in poor weather on Feb. 16.

‘Difficult Weather’

In yesterday’s incident, about 110 passengers, 50 of them
French, and six crew were aboard the Air Algerie flight from
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, to Algiers that crashed “in
particularly difficult weather,” according to French transport
minister Frederic Cuvillier. He said there was no chance of
survivors, while a ground-to-air missile was ruled out.

The plane was lost over the northern Sahel region
yesterday, and its wreckage was found about 50 kilometers (30
miles) inside the territory of Mali, according to Burkinabe
authorities.

“These three catastrophes involved different companies,
totally different origins, different environments and different
aircraft,” Air France KLM’s de Juniac said. “So you cannot
draw a general conclusion that air transport is less safe or
should be avoided.”